


Every Love But True

by Rubynye



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: Amnesia, Canon-Typical Violence, Consent Issues, F/M, First Kiss, Kissing, Mentor/Protégé, Non-Graphic Rape/Non-Con, Rape/Non-con Elements, Red Room, Teaching
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-21
Updated: 2014-09-21
Packaged: 2018-02-18 07:27:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,308
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2340098
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rubynye/pseuds/Rubynye
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Natasha's first kiss.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Every Love But True

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [To Be Modified As Necessary](https://archiveofourown.org/works/415792) by [ignipes](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ignipes/pseuds/ignipes). 



> Title from "Love for Sale" by Cole Porter. Warnings and inspirations discussed in note at end.

After the day's evaluations, the girls are given an unusual unscheduled hour to themselves. Eventually Yelena sits up and accepts some water, then stops halfway through the mugful, spins round and splits his lip with her knuckles, her narrowed eyes glittering. Heartened, he smiles as he takes leave of her, goes to scrub himself under needles of chill water, and dresses in unarmored athletic clothes. Then he waits until the thirty-seventh minute, until purple nightfall has crept midway up the eastern windows, before he lets himself go find Natalia.

She's tucked herself into a blind corner, limbs pale in the dimness, arms wrapped around knees folded to her chest, damp-darkened head tipped down to hide her face; at least she hasn't curled on her side, eyes blank with shock, as Yelena briefly did afterwards despite the care he tried to take. But then what care could have been enough, he asks himself, futility grating down his nerves as he contemplates the girl huddled at the end of the hallway.

He could leave her be for the last little time before their masters summon them both. Instead, he treads quietly -- her shoulders stiffen at his third step, then slump again -- and folds himself up beside her, mirroring her bundled pose. Shifting slightly to leave a careful ten centimeters of space between their shoulders, he greets her with a low, "Alianovna."

Leaned back on cool paint-smoothed concrete, he counts fifty-four seconds before she responds with, "Instructor," as she raises her head to gaze at the nondescript angle of hallway, at nothing.

He looks there too, at the whitewashed wall, at blankness. "How many evaluations?" He keeps his murmur low and emotionless, his words few. Sometimes he's almost sure this language is not his mother tongue, and right now he needs all the fluency he can summon.

"Two," she responds in a matching empty voice. She has earned special notice among their masters, so he's relieved to know she was subjected to no more than the standard set. He would like to pet her hair soothingly, to wrap her in a hug as gentle as a quilt, but he was not remade for gentleness.

Instead he asks, "Your scores?"

"Seventeen and fifteen." She lays her cheek down on her knee, this time with her head turned towards him, but still looking at nothing, her water-tinted eyes greyed by the dimness.

"The average is twelve." He could say that three girls fought and two were sent to reconditioning, that Glasha's weeping still echoes in the pit of his stomach and the tears dripping from Yelena's chin should have burned his chest like acid. He doesn't. "Assessments?"

"Not from the first instructor, unless this counts." She lifts the hem of her loose sleeveless top, revealing a dark handprint crushed into her waist. The mild, fresh waft off her clean skin seems incongruous in contrast with the broad smudge, but bruises can't be scrubbed away. "The second commented that I moved fluidly, but mechanically." Wrapping her arm around her legs again, she tips her chin onto her knee. "I'm not sure how to correct the fault, though. It is a mechanical act, no different from a piston and cylinder."

He opens his mouth, but for a moment his throat squeezes tight, strangling all his words down to appalled silence. His own memories have been stripped away, of this and all else before the past thirty-eight weeks, but he knows as certainly as he breathes that they taught her this conclusion, that they're utterly wrong. A line echoes out of a scooped-out hole in his mind, _Poor kid, fucked without a kiss_ , and he wonders if it was said to or by him, of him or another. He wasn't allowed to offer Yelena a soothing kiss under the observers' hard eyes. He stroked her back instead, as lightly as his calloused palm could manage, murmuring encouraging nonsense as the tear tracks down her cheeks glinted in the harsh overhead light.

He remembers, and buries his shudder. He can't let himself fall into the void inside his head. The girls need better from him than that, especially Yelena earlier, especially Natalia now. He breathes deeply, unlocks his throat, and uses her pet name, "Natasha," gentling his voice to a raspy murmur; she looks at him for the first time, her mouth impassive and her eyes wide. "They taught you so, but that doesn't make it true. May I show you?"

Between blinks her expression settles back into blankness, already seemingly impenetrable. "Of course, Instructor."

"No." He shakes his head, and her feathery eyebrows fly up again. "Rather… would you like a kiss?"

"A kiss?" she echoes, surprise breaking through the cracks of her facade. She regroups with a decisive, "Yes, I would," as she tosses her bright hair, tipping her head back as she peels her arms from around her calves and turns herself towards him. She arranges herself invitingly, her knee leaned against his thigh, but her eyes shine in the dimness now, alight with her true curiosity, and hopefully true assent.

He looks her over carefully first, the width of her pupils, the pulse in her throat, relieved to find no trace of dull acquiescence, proud of how difficult she is to read. Adorned only with youth and scars, draped in slack gymnasium clothes, she's already as lovely as the flowers he remembers without context. In her arched brow and fine cheekbones, the full curve of her lips, he can see the stunning beauty beneath the girlish surface, the woman she'll grow into if she survives this training.

He's bet on her since they met, and with nothing else to stake, he wagers himself. Raising his flesh hand to her chin, he lays two fingers along the petal-soft curve of her cheek. Leaning in, he watches her silk-fine lids veil her glinting green eyes, shuts his and touches his lips to hers, just firmly enough to feel their tender give, her rapt attention.

A few moments' pause while he feels her feeling him, the soft tide of her breath washing across his face, and he tilts his head further and slowly opens his mouth, his split lip aching brightly as he eases hers apart. The first flicker of tongue over her lower lip sends a shock vibrating through her, but she holds her breathing steady, stilling herself again; he strokes her mouth with his the way he would her skin with his hands if she could have come to him in her own time, and she sways in closer, her control wavering. Another slide of tongue, another caress of lips, and she trembles for him again, the tiniest low noise breaking free from the back of her throat.

Her little moan reverberates through him until he could shiver if he let himself, his skin tightening all over with goosebumps and warmth. He pulls himself from her, pressing his back to the cool wall to bleed away the heat, and her eyelashes rise slowly, her lips hang parted for a long moment before she presses them together. There's a flush across her cheekbones and wonder shining in her eyes when she looks up at him, and the shreds of his heart twist as he returns her gaze, at what he must say. "That," he tells her, slipping his fingers from her cheek, "is how I'd kiss a mark."

Her eyes narrow, skin tightening around them, her chin jerks into a nod as she looks down at her knees again, pulling her arms back to her sides. "Of course," she says coolly, "thank you for the demonstration."

She sits beside him, closed up tight, as distant as his locked memories, and he can't leave well enough alone. "Alianovna." She looks up, and he lays his metal hand along her other cheek, cradling her face, the heel of his hand beneath her chin. The sensation is different, not warmth and softness but heft and solidity, the pressure of her strength as she pushes into his touch. He should instruct, he should explain, but "Natalia" is all he can choke out before he kisses her with enough force to tingle his lips and she shudders, once, an unbearably tender vibration. He keeps his mouth shut, not allowing himself to taste her again, and she tilts her face into the kiss for a long sweet moment.

When he drags himself back this time his chest is tight with breathlessness, and she gasps audibly through her nose, a tiny fragment of a smile curving her cheek. "That was different."

"That one was for you." For a moment the smile flickers across her mouth, up into her eyes, before she pulls her face back into a calm mask.

He smiles for the second time in a long time, disused muscles creaking in his cheeks, holding his position as she lifts her hand to touch his mouth with silk-rough fingers, her narrow fingertip sweetly stinging the wound in his lip. "Who taught you this?" she asks, and he can feel the warmth radiating from the hidden memory like a banked fire in winter, he closes his eyes and reaches --

\-- but finds nothing, nothing but the momentary flicker of long-lashed blue eyes.

He shakes his head as he looks at her again. "I don't know," tastes familiarly of ashes, but, "someone must have," is at least bittersweet. "Even if I can't remember, I know it happened." He holds out his lifeline to her, what he's clung to these long months since they woke him to this cage, the restraint pulling him back from the one escape he can see. "I know I was someone before they brought us here. So are you."

Even in this forgotten corner he shouldn't risk such honesty, for both their sakes, but Natalia simply nods, unblinking as she listens between the lines. It's taken him some time to rebuild this much sense of himself, catalyzed by the girls he's been assigned to teach, whom he tries to protect despite the futility of hope. This girl looks into him as if she can see into the bottomless pits where his memories were, her fingers still curved to his cheek, her other hand creeping up around his wrist as if she doesn't realize she's doing it. But he knows her already, well enough to know she does nothing except deliberately, and he nods.

"So this is how it's supposed to feel," Natalia says at length, and her voice is low, but fully alive.

He tilts his head and watches her eyes brighten, almost used to knowing it's a charming pose for him without knowing how he knows. "This is how it can feel." He should continue with the lesson, explaining that sex is far more than the mechanical, but what he hears himself say is, "Store this in your muscle memory, bury it beneath your thoughts. One day they will take me from here." He was being watched and evaluated as keenly as Yelena, he knew as he defiantly worked to calm her; outside the examination room another of his fellow nameless operatives, the one with sandy hair, cornered him to scold him helpfully for coddling her. Natalia's fingers tighten on his wrist and his cheek, her earnest face too bright to bear even in this shadowed corner, and he drops his gaze, looking into the void behind his eyes. "If I'm not disposed of," he says, thinking of their increasingly suspicious handlers and the blankness he finds harder and harder to counterfeit, "one day we'll meet and I won't know you. You may not even know me. But you'll still know in your bones how it's supposed to feel."

Natalia's hands are so still and tight he can feel her racing pulse in her fingertips. She draws a slow deep breath, breathes it out just as slowly as she leans in smoothly, leaving him space to dodge, She kisses him now, hard enough to burn, her teeth flat against his broken lip before her tongue shoves boldly up, soothing the cut, stroking into his mouth. He yields to her and she secures her victory just as she does in fights, pushing the kiss deep and slick and shockingly sensual so that his breath catches. Still holding his face, still plundering his mouth, she bursts into motion, gripping his shoulder as she squirms up into his lap, shoving his back against the wall as she presses warmly all over his front, slender and muscled, padded thinly but tenderly at at breast and hip. Shuddering pleasure rips from his throat in a choked groan, far sweeter than the release he helped Yelena coax from his body, and Natalia hums deep in her chest as she pulls back from the kiss, pulling his moan along as her prize.

He manages to push his eyes open and sees hers glinting as she studies him, her nose nearly touching his. Then she ducks her head beneath his chin, tightening her arms around him, tucking her calves beneath his thighs in a fierce hug. He inhales the freshness of her hair, pushing his ribs into the pressure of her embrace, and tries to burn this memory in deeper than they can ever dig it out.

Then she lets go, and he drops his arms and doesn't hinder her as she pushes away, sliding off his lap, curling up again at his side. "We should be seen," she says quietly, but at least not blankly now, and stands.

Not for the first time he wonders if his last sight will be of Natalia standing over him, if he could ever be so fortunate. He nods, reaching up for her extended hand, measuring her growing strength as she pulls him to his feet.

In silent unison, they set their shoulders, clear their expressions, and start walking back.

**Author's Note:**

> I usually try to let my stories speak for themselves, but on this one I thought I should write a couple of notes.
> 
> First of all: on my intentions here. I mean for this to be a moment of consensuality, of mutually supported agency, set against the background of nonconsensuality, of denied agency, that they're trapped in. I envisioned Natasha as heartbreakingly young, but I leave up to the reader to define that precise age according to your comfort level (or to just leave it ambiguous).
> 
> I've wanted to write about Bucky and Natasha's paths crossing since I saw the famous quotation, "A long time ago, Natalia Romanova made me remember what it was to feel human, and they punished us both for that, in different ways." Then I read 's excellent [To Be Modified As Necessary](http://archiveofourown.org/works/415792), in which Natasha tells Steve that Bucky was her first kiss. So I had my story idea for them, and here's the story.


End file.
